Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

132 II · Politik und Demokratie in Europa
Thus what appears to be most striking about EU policy-making taken as a
whole is not the potential for a “race to the bottom” but, to the contrary, the
consistently high levels of regulation found where national governments or
citizens unambiguously desire it, even where no clear legal requirement or
market compulsion exists. 9 In any case, there appears to be little evidence of
a powerful bias toward undesired deregulation within the EU system.
Even if it could be shown that the EU exerts significant downward pressure
on social protection, moreover, there is reason to believe that such
pressure is redundant. The true binding constraints on national social policies
– increasing constraints on the willingness of Europeans to be taxed, an
accelerating demographic shift toward an older population, a shift to service-sector
production, and rising costs of specialized service provision –
may well be largely independent of market integration and European law.
Overall levels of social spending have remained stagnant in the past fifteen
years and most European societies are finding it impossible to maintain current
levels of per recipient spending and regulatory protection. These trends
will continue regardless of EU policy – even if the immediate constraint
takes the form of declining external competitiveness or adverse financial
flows. 10
Scharpf, it should be noted in this regard, concedes that national systems
are in need of significant restructuring and reform. Indeed, one reading of
his own proposals is that they do not democratize EU decision-making per
se (or even promise to sustain current patterns of spending) as much as they
redirect the insulated institutions of the EU to the task of promoting more
of independent supranational activity – e.g. ephemeral financial discretion wielded by the
Commission in structural policy funding, the Commission’s use of Article 90 to liberalize
telecommunications, and the ECJ’s assertion of the supremacy of European law – receive
scholarly attention out of proportion to their potential import or generalizability, thus biasing
our overall understanding of European integration. The great majority of policies –
from external trade policy to agricultural policy to standardization policy – continue to
track a consensus of national preferences relatively closely.
9 The most plausible theoretical account of this appears to be a classically intergovernmental
one, whereby supermajoritarian (sometimes unanimous) voting rules and myriad
means of informal control consistently permit national majorities to protect their intense
interests at the European level.
10 Three examples must suffice: Ferrera/Hemerijck/Rhodes (2000); Iversen/Wren (1998);
Pierson (2001). It is true, however, that the costs of social welfare benefits are born increasingly
by the recipients of those benefits, rather than by the wealthy – a point Scharpf
rightly highlights. As a result, systems as a whole are redistributing less than they might
otherwise. Some attribute this to interdependence, but there are many other explanations,
cf. Dani Rodrik (1997).